The Gately Report: Splunk Focusing on 'Future-Proof' Cybersecurity

Splunk partners play a key role in the company’s mission to give its customers future-proof cybersecurity technologies.

That’s according to Mike Horn, senior vice president and general manager of Splunk security products. We spoke with him at last week’s Splunk Conf24.

During Conf24, Splunk unveiled new security offerings that include Enterprise Security 8.0, a new Federated Analytics feature, new generative AI assistants for security and observability, and more.

“I think it's an exciting time to be in security,” Horn said. “There are a lot of things that are happening in the vendor landscape. But I think helping protect our customers is No. 1 for me. So when I think about the future, it's really about helping customers future-proof their security technologies. How do we make sure that they have the best analytical capabilities so that they can get signals out of the data that they have? How do we help make sure they have the best response capabilities so they can react quickly when something, an alert, goes off? A big part of our strategy is really that continued push on unification.”

Splunk's Mike Horn

Future-Proof Cybersecurity Includes Full TDIR

The future is all about helping customers have a more seamless experience across Splunk security products and then extending into Cisco (which acquired Splunk in March) over time to be able to perform the full threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR) life cycle, Horn said.

“So this is what happened, when did it happen, how did it happen and who's impacted by this,” he said. “Answering all those critical questions is hugely important. And then we can't talk about the future and not talk about AI. All these things lay a foundation that we can layer AI on top of to be able to accelerate that analyst experience. How do we help them make those decisions quicker? How do we help them make more accurate decisions? So I think there are some really interesting things there.”

The Self-Driving Cars Analogy

When it comes to autonomous security operations centers (SOCs), Horn said self-driving cars provide good insight into what the future might look like in autonomy and security.

“We didn't jump to full self-driving cars, and some people would say that's still a little ways out,” he said. “But I use my intelligent cruise control all the time. I use my lane controls all the time to let me not pay as much attention to steering. So I think there are going to be a set of things that we'll be able to fully automate for users in the early days, and then we'll continue down that path and be able to automate more and more things as the AI systems continue to mature and as confidence from the customer side grows. So I think it's an exciting time to be in security for sure.”

Scroll through our slideshow above for more from Horn and more cybersecurity news.